Developing Tech That Can Last On Venus

it's amazing to me to think that spacecraft have actually gone to the surface of Venus and taken pictures and the environment there is horrible we always talk about how it's hot enough to melt lead that the pressures or the equivalent of being under the ocean at a kilometer and there's sulfuric acid is trying to eat in and it's sort of surprising that Landers have survived at all but the Soviets pulled it off but they didn't last long just a few minutes what would it take to send some kind of Lander to the surface of Venus that could survive for not minutes but maybe days months maybe even indefinitely so my guest today is Dr Tibor kremick who works at Nasa Glenn Research Center and he and his team are working on electronics batteries other components of a spacecraft that are designed not only to survive at high temperature but to really function to thrive in temperatures that are that hot and under those kinds of pressure and corrosive chemical conditions as well so we talk about the different kinds of electronics Battery Systems and other ideas to have a much longer exploration from the surface of Venus right here's the interview does our imagination let us properly appreciate just how awful it is down at the surface of Venus um well it was some people that was really exciting imaginations probably can but I think it's really hard I think it's really hard to appreciate how how challenging it is yeah like when you look at Venus like when you look at pictures of the surface of Venus even the ones taken by Venera spacecraft it looks like you're I don't know like near a volcano the sky is sort of uh orangey yellow and cloudy and the rocks look like they're covered in Sulfur but it's far worse than that right um well that's a great description I mean it's it's kind of eerie like you're like you're in an oven where everything's around you is just hot I mean it gives you that that sense uh it is worse than that um in terms of you know the pressure part so that that that that that scene doesn't really reflect the the intense pressure that one sees also there's um I think some challenges that people don't appreciate as you get to the surface itself coming from space very cold you're going uh very quickly through uh well not so quickly through a sulfuric acid bath if you will through the clouds then it just gets hot and really dense and high pressure and then you described it well on the surface it's like a orange Mist kind of very thick you don't really see very well you can't like pinpoint where the sun would be it's all very diffuse so just kind of a uh you know a fuzzy red glow orange glow and it's hot right yeah and I mean I love the story when you think about say the the Soviets attempting to land on Venus with their Venera program it was all about like each probe they made a little tougher and then learned where it failed and then until finally they were able to reach the ground but they did they had no idea what environment they were going into they just knew that they hadn't built their last spacecraft Tough Enough until they finally did yes um so then you know and yet with the vanilla program we only got less than an hour of observations from the surface of Venus so what will it take to be able to have something last on the surface of Venus for a longer period of time yeah that's a great question um and so like you said there have been many many attempts right to to put down very large sophisticated heavy platforms on the surface of business in you know minutes right and you know that it lasts right all that investment all that energy all that money just only lasts for a few minutes wonderful science still wonderful to take some of those measurements a lot can be done but it's not that's not what we're trying to do here what we're trying to do instead of trying to control this really nasty environment around us and really doing that without a way to to to harness power or energy out of the system what we're trying to do is make ourselves and design it so that we're happy living in that nasty nasty environment that's really our approach so we're putting away the large the big the heavy and trying to control our thermal environment rather we're going from the other direction we're leveraging Investments and years and years of work that we've done in high temperature Electronics sensors and to build a system that will be happy in that nasty environment and that's our approach and if you can do that with the appropriate power system that's how you can attain weeks and months of life on the surface of Venus so then break that down for me like if you're looking at it from the conditions of Venus where would a traditional spacecraft fail and what are the pieces that you then have to re-engineer yeah so the the Achilles heel of spacecraft that Venus is primarily the temperature so and the temperature um so that we we can make vessels that keep out the pressure and many of our our systems that we take there aren't really susceptible to pressure but they are susceptible to temperature so what happens is that um and it's primarily the electronics right so we send this vessel down um the way the Soviets have done it is they had this joint pressure vessel and they had phase change material so that would keep the temperature at a Max for you know like you said minutes right until it soaks in all that heat and eventually that phase change material expires if you will all the energy it can absorb is gone and then the temperature inside starts to rise and then when it hits the limitations of the electronics that's when things stop operating and that's when the life ends so so that's really what what kills spacecraft it's a temperature of the and the capability of the electronics to sustain and operate and those conditions right you're so your shoulders melting your batteries are frying every part of the spacecraft Electronics is designed to work it you know room temperature-ish on Earth not that all right yeah that's correct that's exactly right and even some of the what we call high temperature on Earth are nowhere near the 460 degrees that Venus is at so high temperature Electronics you might say 200 degrees C or something like that we're at 460 on the surface of Venus so quite a bit of a gap there between what we can do with traditional terrestrial electronics and what has to work on Venus right okay so then explain then the I guess the process what are the technologies that can swap out some of the more vulnerable Parts into something that can handle that high temperature environment yeah so the key that um that we're leveraging is like I said Decades of investment in silicon carbide based Electronics so it's not silicon it's a wider band Gap so the energy levels to move things around in the electronics are higher and that allows us to and that technique and you know deliberately designing for robust systems so looking very carefully at um how systems fail at those temperatures over time right and then adjusting the the fabrication of the internal designs of the ICS and so forth using these materials that are specialized and can endure not only the temperatures but also some of the chemical things so one of the things we haven't talked about is the chemistry at the surface is also not very friendly so it's reactive and so as you when it doesn't matter if you're going to be there for a few minutes but as you're talking about weeks and months you have to be compatible with that reactive chemistry and so those are all the pieces that we're we're working on so but but primarily it's leveraging the silicon carbide based electronics that have the ability to operate and we've demonstrated operation of those types of electronics for thousands of hours at 500 wow or more we see so so you can take a silicon carbide microchip and run it in 500 Celsius for long periods of time with no detrimental effects that's correct right right that's exactly correct now now one thing I would point out is that the the sophistication and level of these electronics are not what we're accustomed to in our terrestrial Electronics so um you know it won't have the power of our smartphones for example it's simpler Electronics thing think back in some of the early space missions that's the Fidelity that's the the capabilities that these types of electronics can handle it today but of course we've invested effort and we're continuing to invest effort to make those become smaller make them be able to do more processing more complex and allow us to eventually get to that level of sophistication but that'll be a little bit farther down the road right first generation won't be about that power level right so you can't go to Intel and request a silicon carbide version of the i7 no right right no no no I mean you can go there but you're not going to get anything you don't get anywhere you know they don't have a chip Fab set up for that so then like give me that you say like the sophistication of these early spacecrafts so essentially you are creating your own chips with the materials that you have available but with this other kind of of chemistry so what is it about silicon carbide that provides that temperature protection it's it's the wide band Gap it's the energy levels and then the materials that are in there that allow allow it to operate at those higher temperatures and and our house ceramic yeah go ahead and like theoretically let's say you could convince Intel to go and redesign their chip Fabs would you be able to see performance out of silicon carbide that would match existing silicon chips or is there some kind of like fundamental uh lack of performance just coming from that that material well there's a fundamental difference so um I I'm not probably the best one to predict how closely one can um get to but there are physics there are physics driven uh things the the the transport of electrons and so forth are different the architecture so so an IC chip can be developed using different types of uh electronic transistors different types of transistors and components that can create that so um most of our Electronics right now are based on the Field Effect transistors so jfets is basically the the architecture the transistor architecture that we're using so those have certain features that are different from bipolar Junction transistors for example and so on so so um so there's it's a it's a deeper kind of question than you know what the IC itself can do it's really the nature of the the pieces that you make that up with and each of those have features so some of them for example because of the electronics that the jfit architecture we're using that has a certain power consumption characteristics it also has limitations on how quickly one can switch from one state to another and so as we look to increase our for example communication frequencies we're gonna have to move away from the jfit architecture and into something else to allow us to get those higher rates of transmission and and switching between these devices so so those are examples where I'm trying to convey that um you know so there's it's a whole it's a whole uh how do I want to say this there's a whole series of things that have to kind of grow and mature together to be able to reach that level of sophistication right I mean different techniques different devices and then they all uh protrude but there's going to be fundamental differences just by the nature of the of the materials that we use I mean I'm sure as you look at the capabilities of an existing spacecraft say you take the dart Mission or something that else that you've worked on and you look at all of the off-the-shelf components that you're just relying on on the communication systems on the on the bus on the memory architecture all of that kind of stuff you can't take any of that for granted anymore you've got to go and re-architect each one of those pieces using this essentially entirely new ecosystem and you don't have you can't get a giant Intel chip Fab working on your behalf so you're having to replace this functionality so you lose performance but I'm guessing what you gain is that it even functions which is correct absolutely exactly right right and you you've said it very well it goes across the whole system so Electronics is only one piece of it right but there's a power system there's a communication system all those are have to like you said they have to work all of that together and increase the capabilities of all of those to have the system work because it's like a chain right one piece doesn't work you don't have a power source nothing's going to happen you don't have a communication system you don't get any data back you don't have Electronics you can't do any processing or take measurements if you don't have the sensors you can't get the data off the surface so all those pieces like you say have to work kind of together and they all have different challenges so that's really the fun part about this and this is why you know I love what I do yeah right because we're tackling all of this stuff and it's really exciting right and I can just imagine as you say you you look at all of these pieces and then you go yeah but what if it was on Venus and you'd be like oh right the antenna would melt oh right the you know the the solder would would melt as well so so let's talk about you know we've talked about like the the chip side and it sounds to me like seeing this run in an oven for months on end and still Computing happily has got to make you feel confident that that piece of the puzzle is now moved into the engineering realm and needs Solutions let's talk about batteries because this is sort of what puts you onto my radar in the first place you're working on a battery that can theoretically work in a high temperature environment that's correct that's correct so um basically what we're doing here is we're leveraging Investments uh made by others in government and Industry they're called thermal batteries so these are batteries that um are designed to sit uh very comfortably for years and years and years keep their charge they're totally inactive totally dormant and uh terrestrial what has to happen is that they have to be raised to a high temperature and that's typically done by firing a pyro that's inside the battery itself so that it can soften up and get the electrochemistry can start to function right so so on Venus we've got the the the opportunity if you will to just harness the heat locally we don't have to fire anything right but just let it get hot as it descends you know the spacecraft is descending into the environment I mean through the atmosphere as they get close to the surface if it gets hot enough then this then the electrolytes in there will will melt basically and it'll start acting as a battery it'll start generating power so that's really what's Happening Here is we're taking a an Earth application and flipping it over on its head not not putting it into an environment that the battery itself is happy but we we have to modify the the the the chemistry in the internals because typically the applications here are very high powers for very short time periods on Venus we want to do just the opposite we want to have long periods of operation and just minimize the amount of energy that we're taking out at a beach time so there's work to to work on there was work to develop we redevelop the chemistry if you will but still keep the feature of it being totally um resilient like a brick if you will as it comes in as it goes but then it will just turn on and operate for a long period of time in Venus so that that was the approach we took and that's kind of where uh it's looking at it's going to happen and and what are the like give us a sense of like the kind of chemistry or materials that are involved and how they're different from I guess like a traditional battery like a lithium battery or zinc um so so I'm not I'm not a electoral chemist right right so some of those are I won't be able to get too much details but um yeah they're um yeah so their lithium iron sulfite elements as well as other things I'd have to point out I'd have to go talk to somebody okay okay but the point is is that you've got a mix of chemicals that that it great it batteries at 450 Celsius on the surface of of Venus that's correct as it gets warmer you know we're we're up above well above 300 degrees Celsius that that there's a solid electrode at lower temperatures that melts at those temperatures and then it allows for the the currents to flow in the chemistries between the cathode anode and function of this electrode and we have multiple cells that are put together to give us the right voltage that our system needs to run those Electronics because they'll also have different Power needs than normal Electronics you know a couple small five volt thing won't work for us right now so so all that again works as a system together but we we design that battery for the voltage that has produced the the pressures that it has to take and also the chemistry that has to to live in um again we're we're always mindful that we're in a reactive chemistry so we have to pick so copper and things like that we typically use that a spacecraft are not going to work on Venus and so you would I mean I don't even know how you would describe it but you would charge it up here on Earth almost by I don't know putting in the right metals or maybe heating them up and then charging it up and then you would let it solidify and then send it to Venus and then as it melted it would it would have that power differential between the cathode and the anode and it would be able to actually start functioning as a battery do you have a sense of of how long the battery would last yes so that's really so um that's really what we've been working on is to to make sure that the battery itself doesn't um erode its own energy because of the things that are going inside the battery so self-discharging we minimize the self-due search after that it's really a function of What the how how we're drawing energy out of it so it so we'll have a certain amount of Watt hours certain amount of energy that's in that battery over time that's going to slowly deplete because there is some self-discharging but but if that's low enough then it's really a function of how we choose to take the energy out of it and that's another feature of what we're trying to do is that we we are not um we're focusing the type of on the type of science that's really um uniquely aligned with what we can do the long life on the surface of Venus so so that's never been done before taking time-based measurements things like weather for example I try to imagine you know right you put a Lander that lasts for a few minutes on the surface and then trying to predict what the what the with the weather the climate is like on Venus it's going to be really tough to do right so so we're trying to do focus on science that you can do uniquely well or uniquely with the fact that you're there for long periods of time so we've taken time-based uh temperature measurements pressure measurements wind measurements um energy deposition so how much energy from the Sun actually gets down to the surface those are the types of things we do so so what we do is the way we operate this is that those types of measurements don't require very high frequency measurements so we don't have to take 10 samples of temperature a second where we know that over a whole venous day it's only going to vary two or three degrees Celsius right so we're going to we we um basically keep track of time most of our mission and then periodically let's say maybe every eight hours we'll take it we'll take readings we'll take readings of all our sensors and transmit them and then we'll go to sleep so that we can extend the time that we're available we can stay alive on the surface so by doing that seek by doing that process we should we we expect and we're designing for being able to operate for 60 days on the surface of Venus with larger batteries we can we can double or triple that depends on how much you know battery Mass we want to take that's where most of our Mass goes to in fact is the battery and so you could provide foreign I guess intermittent weather measurements over the course of 60 days from from this which is long enough to get a sense of what the weather is like on Venus because right now the assumption is that it's always hot but you know who knows if it's like variations in hot um slight version is hot but there's also so there's also um the the timing of this the 60 days was really targeted from a science perspective so the Venus solar day is um you know it's it's so Venus rotates to every 243 days it's solar day because it's spinning backwards it's twice that right so if we have a mission for 60 days what that does is it guarantees us we go from a day to a night or a night to a day transition somewhere in there and that's never been measured so we don't uh you know so I don't know if you're familiar with the super rotation the the the winds winds up in the upper clouds and so so we don't really still understand what drives that we have some theories and ideas but we don't really know the key some of the key is is what's happening at the surface right and so for our ability to take measurements across that transition May really help inform you know the global weather the global climate the global atmospheric dynamics of the system and so we've targeted our 60 days to make sure no matter when we land we're going to capture one of those events and what about being able to analyze the chemistry of the atmosphere as well I mean I know that you know we don't really understand if there's volcanism on Venus active volcanism would you be able to analyze the chemistry of the atmosphere and be able to give a sense of what's going on there yes in fact that that is one of the um we so we have a chemical sensor suite and what it does it uses mems devices and for certain species so it's not like a mass spectrometer where we ingest and then look at the look at what's there what we do is we have tuned um mems sensors that look at abundances of certain species things that we expect to have on the Venus near the venous surface and we use those these are very small low power devices and we do just like with our weather measurements we take those so we're measuring chemical abundance variants over time for those selected species so we are doing that and that's another measurement we can take with very low power low data volume types of measurements what we can do over time and like you say if there's some outgassing if we're by a volcano is it spewing out SO2 is what's happening some you know those things we would be able to detect what about moving I mean you know when you look at Mars exposure to Mars I mean the Rovers have revolutionized what we're able to find traveling from from place to place but I'm sure with that you need better communication to and from the spacecraft some kind of camera system like it starts to get complicated fast have you thought about what it might take to build a Rover we have we have actually we've pulled together a team of experts from around the country um not that long ago and we looked at basically surface platforms what what sort of science could you achieve with different capabilities Mobility is one of those if you had Mobility you can do certain things if you had a lot more intelligence processing power higher Fidelity Electronics you can do other things and so we've looked at if you had more time you can do more things right so so we have looked at Rovers The the I think and personally the hardest challenge with Rovers on the surface of Venus is a power system if you had power if you had enough power you can control your thermal environment some of those things are really difficult to do in those conditions those are the things you'd really focus on and to use some of the terrestrial capabilities and and and invest in the cooling so so power is a key for some of these and mobility of course needs higher power than you typically have with a battery right at least not for a long Mission so you would need something different and that's where that's a that's uh that yeah that's the key there a high temperature power system that has long life and that would give you the ability to do mobility and the assumption that I guess we're making in the beginning is that this this battery is being sent to Venus fully charged and then it's going to discharge over the course of its Mission correct is there any way to get energy into it from the surface of of Venus yeah that's a great question so we've been looking at that too so there are there are two candidates for that at the moment that we've noted on one of them there is solar energy that does get to the surface it's it's much lower than here on Earth even though it's closer to the Sun but because of those thick clouds layers and a very dense atmosphere not much of it actually gets to the surface so so and then the temperatures also will make a system that captures solar energy converts it to the electrical very inefficient so you need large areas for very little power so but that could be enough to trickle charge for example a battery recharge a battery so that's one another one is wins so we we the the the missions that have gone to the surface of Venus have detected surface wind speeds um somewhere they all read somewhere between a quarter to about a meter and a half uh meters per second as the velocities of those so one can imagine maybe harnessing some of that with some sort of windmill um so so we have designs uh and and thought and some concepts of how to do that again you know unless you're taking a very large system it's going to be small amounts of power so the velocities are low even though it's very dense so that's a good thing but the velocities are very low so you get minimal energy that you can take out of that the the thing with the wind one is that we don't have enough measurements to be real confident as to if we're going to have wind at the spot we land and how how persistent and consistent is it and so so I think we're going to have to take some of these early measurements like with what we're doing now measure the winds and then in the future we can design some systems that can maybe take advantage of some of that so so so right now the battery is seems like the best thing to do initially research by NASA a few years ago into looking into non-electronic forms of Rovers Clockwork Rovers that could explore the surface of Mars have has any of those ideas sort of continued on into the work that you're doing well I'm not the one to comment on on you know how those were progressed I do know some of the people that have developed those and we've interacted with them so um there they have done some work I don't know how how this progressing today so I can't really answer that question what I can say though is that I think in the long term we probably um want to be working together with some of those capabilities and those ideas along with some of the a very focused ones that maybe we have so you if you have those types of Rovers that's really wonderful you're still going to want to get the data off and somehow transmit it to to an Orbiter or back to Earth and so so some of those techniques are are hard to uh see how that that's viable right now so there's still maybe some elements of those types of rowers even though um you know you can find mechanical ways to to keep track of time or move and mobility and all kinds of things there might be some combination that might be the best if we work together on that so that that's my personal view on that but um I don't know where they're at yeah the the actually the the methods of communicating Nation mechanically were actually my favorites of the whole system yeah yeah because they would do things like have like retro reflectors that are spinning around and they can mechanically change and so you could view from orbit a configuration of retro reflectors on the top of the Rover and you would use that to transmit information as an order is flying past since you wouldn't necessarily need to have a so like a radar a radar reflector yeah exactly yeah you have a radar reflector on the top of it and you would be able to kind of open and close some kind of dot matrix uh on top of the spacecraft and then as your Orbiter flew over overhead it would measure that and go okay that's the weather that's the temperature whatever and keep moving and save yourself all of the power of the transmitter so actually you know when I was keeping track of those signs papers cool I mean the Strand beasts concept was great but I I really yeah because like I really suspect that it's going to be that communication is going to be power hungry how do you get that information from the surface of Venus through that horrible atmosphere and you're absolutely right that that is the big energy draw yeah so so let me let me ask you a question then uh so I haven't followed this um so in terms of the measurements themselves so they have a techn so the the mechanical approaches they have a way to mechanically capture temperature or or some data and then and then transfer that mechanically to right this indicator yeah that you would have some kind of mechanical version of a thermometer that would that would based on the temperature that was reading it would open up a different configuration of radio yeah reflectors radar reflectors on the top of the Rover that would then be read by something from space like Braille almost and yeah but I think that in in your situation obviously you can skip all that and just go straight to configuring the reflectors electronically so I so I suspect that there's a lot of really great ideas to solve some of those problems so there's there's another I think it was a niacc grant a couple of years ago about a like a like a wind sale like something that we're just yeah I'm not familiar with that like a land tale that would just slowly drift across yeah yeah they had solar panels for the for the sale itself right or on the snow stuff yep yeah I see I've seen that one yeah yeah and I and like I wonder like you talk about that idea of solar panels but I think you're you're probably back to that same issue right that you have to like a solar panel is a computer chip and so you would need to re-engineer and so so do you feel pretty confident that you can make solar panels out of these silicon carbide chips so that's not work that we're doing here but I've yes uh so there are um there are people uh boy I'm trying to I'm drawing a blank on his name Jonathan is his first name uh grandidier I think is who who the uh the principal investigator was for some NASA awarded activity to develop a high temperature solar cell so yes there's been some work uh there's been some promising work on that we don't we don't we're not working on that right now here um but we have talked to them because as I mentioned to you the trickle charging so uh so one of our one of our um life limiting things is the most of the power goes into the communication system as you mentioned that's where the energy goes but the second thing that actually takes the uh energy um is the keeping of time keeping track of time because we're using the electronic system for that so um so even though it's very low but it's always on and so if we can come up with a recharging system if you will maybe with solar cells that makes up that difference then then our life can really grow quite quite significantly right so then it's really we still have to especially if we have something above that right we can slowly recharge and and if we um set our frequency of communications equal to the you know the energy that it takes that to the energy we charge with we can potentially go indefinitely right so so those are things that we're we're looking at right so in the beginning you're you're checking every couple of hours and then you start checking every couple of days and then every couple of months and you're looking for those much longer seasonal patterns as long as you can stay ahead of the power drain you could last until I guess the correct dismantles at an atomic level yeah yeah well well that's right we'll we'll you know we'll have to build a thing so that the corrosion doesn't happen either we'll select our materials that it's if it doesn't happen but but that's where uh something like a solar cell high temperature could really play into the system and and how we've why we've been talking to them about those kinds of things you know what are the areas that are necessary how big are we if we make it too big then of course then it's difficult to to land and integrate into other vehicles and if it's too small then we won't get enough power so those are all the kinds of Trades that we we continue to do so this is going to sound really weird but are there any advantages to Venus like like you know NASA is planning on sending this helicopter to Titan titans another very inhospitable environment and yet it has a thick it has a low gravity and a thick atmosphere that allows a helicopter to function actually quite nicely is there anything that that Venus has going for it with all of this sort of horrible environment oh well so yeah so what's the motivation for going to Venus and there and there's a whole bunch of them right um you know beyond the obvious it's a mysterious place and we want to explore and we want to find out but but um you know a little bit more deliberate more deeper than that so Venus is you know our closest neighbor right is the planet that's closest to us it's very similar in size the mass is very similar probably made of the same materials and and so forth the composition is similar so so why are are there so so different right um and so the thinking is that uh Venus is there's probably more venuses out there than there are Earths and so when we look at star or planets around other stars when we look at our planet what what can we learn and so Venus could tell us a lot right um trying to some of these solve these Mysteries well tell us a lot about our solar system about Earth and about other planets around Stars so all these Mysteries like you know why do you have the super rotation why is Venus spinning so doggone slow and backwards you know what what's going on with the the magnetic field that we can't find you know you know what does that tell us about the interior um you know so so there's other other simple kind of fun things to think about you know Venus's day is longer than it's here and and you know no Seasons all these things so in the super rotation so there's a whole boatload not even getting into some of the atmospheric things that are quite unique the UV absorber which you probably heard about um detection of phosphine and something so so all kinds of things about Venus that it's a laboratory for us to learn about ourselves and about other other bodies so so there's a lot of compelling reasons to go to Venus yeah and I love that idea that Venus I mean is another planet in that it's an earth-sized world with an earth-sized man Earth amount of mass with Earth gravity in the habitable zone of the Sun and yet we can tell it is not habitable to Earth life and and so it how fortunate we are that we have an earth analog right here with us in the solar system but but then you think about how difficult it does for for us to even analyze Venus and it's right over there and then we think about the search that we're trying to conduct for extrasolar planets which are tens of light years away it shows us the scale of the challenge that we face but but I guess what I mean issues is the potential of of what we can learn by exploring Venus too yeah absolutely and I guess I guess what I was getting at not necessarily from a like why go to Venus but more of a of the engineering challenges are there any advantages to Venus itself does it does it for despite all of its sort of horrible conditions is is actually giving us any benefits in terms of making some aspect of the engineering a little easier um one of them makes engineering easier but I think there are benefits so whenever we tackle these difficult challenges there are benefits to our understanding of physics and the things that we're developing for Venus will help us here so there are venus-like applications here on Earth um mining deep mining for example so the the temperatures and conditions are not all that dissimilar in some situations on Earth and so the advancements we're making in terms of the sensors the ability to process to understand what's going on will allow us to be more efficient smarter at the things that we're doing here so so there are terrestrial reasons to do and benefits that we get by tackling these engineering challenges making combustion engines more efficient being smarter about those taking measurements in places closer to where the action is allows us to do those things better so there's all kinds of things some of which I don't even think we have an idea of how much it can impact in a good way our life here so so I think I think when we tackle and we overcome some of these challenges sometimes we don't know yet even all the benefits that it's going to have later because we just never thought about it so yeah and you know I think about like deep rock geothermal power where you're going down to the point where your traditional Electronics can start melting thing if you want to analyze the state of the borehole having a computer that can handle that kind of high temperature sounds like like an advantage um but like you know being down on the surface of Venus has been described as being under the ocean like under under a kilometer of water and that pressure and yet if you're the bottom of the ocean things would float so are there I guess like do balloons work dirigibles deplins inflatable bouncy castles is there some is there some strategy that that would actually work quite well down near the surface of Venus in terms of mobility and getting around yeah that's a that's a great question so that is actually one of the things that again we looked at when we're talking about exploring the surface um are are using so instead of driving around because you know um when you think about it uh and you get closer into the details as Venus surface very a large chunk of it is very similar you know kind of flat so so what we like to explore are our transitions where change is happening or go from one one type of surface to another type of surface and that tells us more than a big area of the same right so on Venus we'd have to go a very long way our mobile Mobility on Mars that's not probably good enough for the type of Mobility we would need on Venus so you just you just pointed out one of the areas that one of the ways that you'd get around that is by using the the atmosphere that's moving above you and then using some sort of floating platform right there's some sort of balloon based system to move around and there have been studies about that um so as you get higher in altitude the temperature becomes more Earth-like right so there are conditions where you're in the clouds so you've got your sulfuric acid problem but your temperature and your pressure conditions are what you're used to dealing with so so there are balloon Concepts the of course the Soviets have flown blooms in the past as well um there are NASA concepts for balloons both ones that just float ones that can control their altitude different techniques for doing that and even some Concepts where they go down and can touch the surface somewhere go back up and then come back down that Hood um reduce some of the technical challenges if you're if you're only down at the surface for short periods of time um and and you know you use the atmosphere to your advantage to move somewhere else so there are those kinds of ideas to to really understand the system a complex system like Venus we probably need elements of all of these we'll probably need we need time on the surface at those temperatures to probe the interior to probe deeper into the chemistry get below the weathering layer that's on the chemically weathered layer that's on surface and maybe alien whether to but but then again spend time and situ in the clouds and all these things to get a whole better picture of the whole systems so I think all of those are factors and all those are are techniques and tactics we can use to get a big better picture yeah it is interesting like philosophically for the longest time we've been quite fixated on Mars on the habitability of Mars is there was there water on Mars is there life on Mars but now with the rise in discovery of all of these exoplanets the questions about these exoplanets are coming faster than the answers are coming and now we know of over 5 300 confirmed exoplanets probably tens of thousands of of candidate worlds suddenly trying to understand another planet has become a high priority and suddenly we realize the Gap in our knowledge about Venus like like the resolution of Magellan it's right there yeah the resolution of Magellan is terrible right like I think it's like 100 meters a pixel or something or 30 meters a pixel like like and yet with Mars we can see things that are a few centimeters across from space like Suddenly It's this yeah this wonderful planet is right there we know almost nothing about it it's time to learn it's time to learn and and so yeah I'm sure you're familiar with the missions that NASA selected and also contributing with Envision so we're hoping to uh you know improve on that of the Insight that we have from Magellan really do that at much higher resolution understand the surface a lot better and probe through with some of the in those narrow bands that we can actually look at and look at bulk mineralogy and so forth so these missions are going to be really exciting I mean I think I think what we're doing here is kind of a a step that's going to be critical to understanding Venus that that goes beyond what an Orbiter can do and that's again the beauty of having multiple and I think the need for having multiple assets tackle different parts of the problem because it is a system so we'll learn about this it's going to give us great data that's going to inform something else and and so on and it just builds yeah and the more we have there like with Mars the quicker we can get a picture of the total system well it's been great to talk to you if people want to follow your work or follow the research that that your group is doing what's the best place to do that that's a wonderful question so um nobody ever knows the answer to this it's so funny yeah yeah yeah nobody asked me that Google Scholar yeah different parts of that um we have websites for so we have we have a Venus simulation capability where we can simulate the venous pressure temperature and the complex chemistry extended periods of time so that's what we'll be doing a lot of our testing for our system so we have a website on that that that's active that'll show some of the tests that we've done some of the results where we've looked at chemical weathering so there's some of that I do present at a number of different places so anybody that looks at Venus science a number of papers so that's probably the the mechanisms that are most common or these reach out to me directly right I don't have like a blog or anything like that and that's best I think you know stay off of social media just focus on on exploring Venus I think that are working for all of us well if if and when you do send your spacecraft to for months on Venus would you would you let us know oh you bet yeah let everybody know about that one I'm sure you will well thank you so much for your time and good luck it sounds exciting well thank you I appreciate the interest and great talking to you take care you can get even more space news in my weekly email newsletter I send it out every Friday to more than 60 000 people I write every word there are no ads and it's absolutely free subscribe at university.com newsletter you can also subscribe to the universe Today podcast there you can find an audio version of all of our news interviews and Q and A's as well as exclusive content subscribe at university.com podcast or search for Universe today on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you get your podcast a huge thanks to everyone who supports us on patreon and helps us stay independent thanks to all the interplanetary researchers the interstellar adventurers and the Galaxy wanders and a special thanks to David Gilton in modsu George Jeremy matter Jordan young Tim Whalen Dave veribayoff Josh Schultz and mdroom gross who support us at the master of the universe level all your support means the universe to us

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 79,059

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy

Id: iVtquFgZ2pQ

Length: 44min 40sec (2680 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023